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This etext was produced by Martin Robb

THE MARQUIS OF LOSSIE. by George MacDonald

CHAPTER I: THE STABLE YARD

It was one of those exquisite days that come in every winter, in
which it seems no longer the dead body, but the lovely ghost of
summer. Such a day bears to its sister of the happier time something
of the relation the marble statue bears to the living form; the
sense it awakes of beauty is more abstract, more ethereal; it lifts
the soul into a higher region than will summer day of lordliest
splendour. It is like the love that loss has purified.

Such, however, were not the thoughts that at the moment occupied
the mind of Malcolm Colonsay. Indeed, the loveliness of the morning
was but partially visible from the spot where he stood the stable
yard of Lossie House, ancient and roughly paved. It was a hundred
years since the stones had been last relaid and levelled: none of
the horses of the late Marquis minded it but one her whom the
young man in Highland dress was now grooming and she would have
fidgeted had it been an oak floor. The yard was a long and wide
space, with two storied buildings on all sides of it. In the centre
of one of them rose the clock, and the morning sun shone red on
its tarnished gold. It was an ancient clock, but still capable of
keeping good time good enough, at least, for all the requirements
of the house, even when the family was at home, seeing it never
stopped, and the church clock was always ordered by it.

It not only set the time, but seemed also to set the fashion of
the place, for the whole aspect of it was one of wholesome, weather
beaten, time worn existence. One of the good things that accompany
good blood is that its possessor does not much mind a shabby coat.
Tarnish and lichens and water wearing, a wavy house ridge, and
a few families of worms in the wainscot do not annoy the marquis
as they do the city man who has just bought a little place in the
country. When an old family ceases to go lovingly with nature, I
see no reason why it should go any longer. An old tree is venerable,
and an old picture precious to the soul, but an old house, on which
has been laid none but loving and respectful hands, is dear to the
very heart. Even an old barn door, with the carved initials of hinds
and maidens of vanished centuries, has a place of honour in the
cabinet of the poet's brain. It was centuries since Lossie House
had begun to grow shabby and beautiful; and he to whom it now
belonged was not one to discard the reverend for the neat, or let
the vanity of possession interfere with the grandeur of inheritance.

Beneath the tarnished gold of the clock, flushed with the red
winter sun, he was at this moment grooming the coat of a powerful
black mare. That he had not been brought up a groom was pretty
evident from the fact that he was not hissing; but that he was
Marquis of Lossie there was nothing about him to show. The mare
looked dangerous. Every now and then she cast back a white glance
of the one visible eye. But the youth was on his guard, and as wary
as fearless in his handling of her. When at length he had finished
the toilet which her restlessness for her four feet were never
all still at once upon the stones had considerably protracted,
he took from his pocket a lump of sugar, and held it for her to
bite at with her angry looking teeth.

It was a keen frost, but in the sun the icicles had begun to drop.
The roofs in the shadow were covered with hoar frost; wherever
there was shadow there was whiteness. But for all the cold, there
was keen life in the air, and yet keener life in the two animals,
biped and quadruped.

As they thus stood, the one trying to sweeten the other's relation
to himself, if he could not hope much for her general temper, a
man, who looked half farmer, half lawyer, appeared on the opposite
side of the court in the shadow.